Hazel slept in for a short time the following day, opening her eyes only after the sun had fully risen and all the adults who worked for a living were already gone. She rose from the cot she had been loaned by Simone, one of the younger women of the commune. Talking with Simone the previous night, she had learned that apparently another woman had lived in this cottage with her, but something had happened and that woman left the commune to join another group of werewolves. It left her with extra space and a spare bed, which Hazel appreciated.
Stretching for several seconds, she blinked blearily before her plans for today pushed their way into the front of her brain and a wide smile broke out on her face. That was right, they were going to teach her how to make magic potions! She jumped out of bed and hastily pulled some of her new clothes out of her satchel and changed. Waves of blue magic cleaned the shirt and soft cotton pajama pants she had worn to sleep in, then they were stuffed into the bag. Pulling the curtain over the doorway aside, she stepped outside and breathed in the cool air of the morning.
Few werewolves in the commune ate breakfast, and after the big dinner she had partaken in the night before, she could understand why. She therefore made her way out of the cottage and around one of the dead and cold fire pits, nearly skipping as she did, on her way to a ring of tables and fires and big copper pots off to one side of the clearing. This, she had been told, was where the three younger werewolves had their classes, and today she was going to join them. Not all lessons were like the one today; some were instead about reading and maths, and those lessons she planned on skipping. But lessons about magic she was definitely going to be present for.
She waved to the other people who were already gathered there. Of the now-four kids here, she was actually not the youngest. The oldest was a fifteen-year-old boy with dark hair and eyes and deeply tanned skin named Claude. Next came twelve-year-old Chantal, all blonde and pale skin to set herself apart from Claude. Serge was the last of the three and younger even than her at seven. Standing next to the ring of tables and impromptu cauldrons were two women, one who looked middle-aged with prematurely greying hair and the other younger with a bright smile. Elise and Amorette, or at least she thought that was the younger woman's name.
"Good morning, 'Azel!" Amorette said.
Unlike Jean Luc or Grégorie, Hazel had noticed that most of the werewolves here had trouble with the first part of her name. It was something about how French worked that Jean Luc had tried to explain but just made her more confused. She had instead decided just to accept that they were going to call her 'Azel' for the entirety of her time here and roll with it. She pulled out two notebooks, the first with lines on the pages meant for actually taking notes and the other without lines which she used for communication. Writing on the latter for a minute with a few checks of her dictionary, she finally held it up for the adults to see.
'Good morning. When do we start?'
"Eager, are you?" asked Elise. Hazel gave her a nod, to which the woman laughed. "Good.
I am glad one of the young ones is interested. Amorette will work with you and Serge today. Chantal, I'll be teaching you myself
and keeping you from staring at Claude the whole time. How he has not noticed your crush, I will never understand. Claude…" She sighed and shook her head. "I honestly do not know why you keep turning the tanning solution to sludge, but work on it again
, and please get it right this time. We still have some left, but it will only last another month or two."
Hazel had to work to keep her scowl to herself. The first day she was here, when she had gone walking and talking with Grégorie, they found two dead deer and brought them back to butcher. That part had been gross enough, but it paled in comparison to the smell that came out of a jar of nasty yellow-brown paste he had pulled off a shelf. Even after he had finished coating the hides in and they walked away from his tannery shack, the smell still lingered in her nose for hours.
She could understand how useful it was to have a potion that turned animal skins into leather, but did it have to be so foul?!
"Okay, you two," Amorette said as she motioned for Hazel and Serge to sit at one of the tables. "Both of you are young still,
too young to be brewing on your own, so we are going to work together to make a simple potion to get rid of sunburns and blisters and things, okay?"
"Don't wanna," Serge said with a pout, his arms crossed over his chest. "
You are not my mommy. I do not have to do anything you tell me to do."
Amorette's smile turned stiff. Jean Luc had tried to tell Hazel only part of Serge's story the night before, but his thoughts revealed far more. Serge was new to being a werewolf, having been bitten just a few months ago. His parents immediately took him to Paris, not for help but in essence to dump him into the government's arms and run off. The government in turn brought him here to the commune so Jean Luc could take care of him. Serge had not accepted that and made it clear in both thought and spoken word that he firmly believed his parents would come back for him, despite everybody in the commune trying to explain to him that this was his home now.
Before Amorette could say anything, Hazel was writing.
'I want to learn.'
"
At least somebody is adjusting. Okay, 'Azel. Serge, you can watch and join in when you feel ready, alright?
Not like most seven-year-olds are learning to make potions anyway. First, let us talk about the ingredients we have. Burn Balm does not have any animal parts in it, just plants, and the first one…"
Amorette spent several minutes talking about all the herbs and plants on the table between them, then she showed Hazel how to carefully cut the leaves and stems and roots and explained what she meant when she said one had to be diced and another minced. It did not take long before almost the entirety of one lined page was covered in notes, and then it was time to start the real brewing process.
"Azel, I want you to start stirring the pot, and then I will add the ingredients in the order we talked about. Some potions need to be stirred in one direction or another, but for this one it does not matter."
Hearing that, she could not help but frown. Sure, she got to chop the ingredients up, and stirring was important, but there had to be more she could do than just stir. She could stir with just one hand, right? That would let her use her other hand to scoop up the stuff that was within arm's reach.
Or…
She looked down at her left hand and curled her fingers into a fist one by one, starting with her pinky and ending with her thumb. When she opened all her fingers together, a transparent copy of her hand formed in the air in front of her. A sweeping gesture, and her ghost hand wrapped around the long-handled spoon in the cauldron. She moved her real hand in a circle in front of her, and the spoon started turning in a nice wide circle to match. There! Now she could leave the cauldron, though she would still only have her right hand to work with. Her left would have to keep moving if she wanted the spoon to stir.
"I thought I asked you… to…
How are you doing that?"
Tilting her head, she looked back and forth at her fleshy hand and her ghost hand. She had always used one of her hands to guide her magic, but as she kept moving her hand around and around and around in the same circle, she had to wonder. Could she maybe keep the ghost hand moving without her real hand doing anything? Especially something this simple and repetitive. It was just a circle.
Her eyes fluttered closed as she focused all her attention on how the motions of her hand felt. How the skin slid back and forth. How the bones in her wrist shifted against one another. How the muscles of her forearm pulled tight and relaxed. All the sensations repeated themselves again and again. She kept those feelings at the front of her mind and brought her hand to a stop.
When she opened her eyes, her ghost hand and the spoon were still moving.
A wide smile broke out, and she turned to Amorette and stuck both her thumbs up. Her excitement and enthusiasm faded when she saw the woman staring at her in shock. As was Elise. As were Chantal and Claude. She looked to the side to see that Serge was not, but that might have had more to do with the fact that he had turned around to sit with his back to the rest of them.
'What?', she wrote.
"Where… Who taught you how to do that?" Elise finally asked in a shaky voice. "That…
should be impossible."
'Nobody. I teach myself.' They kept staring at her, so she continued,
'I teach myself all my magic. Not hard.'
"You taught yourself? You are eight years old. How could you have taught yourself any of this?!"
'Not 8. Almost 10.'
Amorette perked up when she read Hazel's response. "
Almost ten? I wonder when her birthday is."
"Not the point!" Elise brought her hands up to her face and shook her head. "
What am I supposed to do about this? Just keep working on your potion with Amorette
because that is something makes sense. That is normal. Nine-year-old girls who can cast spells effortlessly without a wand are not.
"
I need to ask Jean Luc about this. Maybe he had read something that will explain something about how this is happening."
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
The ground beneath Hazel swept past with frightening speed as the train chugged its way west. Unlike her last train ride, she was not riding on the tongue between two cars. Instead she sat on top of the last car with her eyes closed, just enjoying the wind rushing past her. Navigating the train station in Paris had been an exercise in frustration, but catching a train for a couple of hours sure beat walking for a week and a half.
After spending time in the commune, she had returned to Bristol for a couple of days to do some research. Part of that was looking for a textbook on French, from which she discovered that she was in fact doing French verbs all wrong. Why they needed to make their language so complicated she did not understand, but that sadly was just the way it was. Now she had to memorize tables of endings to tack onto the words.
…Surely it would not be
too confusing for her to keep using the base form and let other people figure out what she was trying to say. Right?
The other topic she wanted to do research on was more in the vein of history. Perhaps it was because she was looking in a British library, but she had much more trouble finding any mention of locations in France that held the kind of folklore significance or magical history that she had found so readily for the isles of her birth. With that search at a dead end, she instead started looking into what few figures from French history she knew about.
When she asked Jean Luc, he could not tell her much about Joan of Arc other than that he did not believe she was a witch, and the books she read agreed with that. One of her compatriots, however, was a very different story. Gilles de Rais was an officer in the French army, and after France was liberated from the English he retired to his estate to experiment with diabolism, trying to summon literal
demons for reasons that even after a lot of reading she could not figure out. He was eventually arrested for murdering more than a hundred kids to serve as the sacrifices in his rituals, and after his trial he was put to death.
She did not care so much about his execution, but his experiments opened up all sorts of questions. Where was he trying to summon things
from, for instance. Was there really a place called Hell with demons and dead people, or was he trying to create a portal to an Otherworld like the one she saw at Elva Hill? Did making such a tear really require death and sacrifices? Her research on druids a few months back had mentioned that they might have practiced human sacrifices, and the sealed gate to the Greenwild beneath Glastonbury Tor talked about closing it with 'salt and blood and iron'. Maybe that had been a fancy way of saying the person who did that
did sacrifice somebody?
She did not know, but she could not help wanting to find out. Further digging revealed that de Rais's castle was located in a small town named Machecoul. That coincidentally was also where this train was headed.
The train started to slow as it turned a corner, and with a small jump Hazel and Morgan were off the car and standing in grass several dozen yards from the train tracks. Her plan was simple. From what she read, de Rais had never succeeded in his summonings, or at least never
felt like he had succeeded, so the chances of running into a monster should be low. She was not going to take any chances though. If she so much as saw something scary, she was getting out of there right quick.
Buildings were visible in the near distance, and she started walking that direction. As she did, another thought niggled at her, one she had done her best to ignore. She had not necessarily told anyone in the commune that she was planning on leaving or when she would come back. She told herself it was because she did not need to. Like she had told Jean Luc when she first met him, she was a wanderer. She had places to explore.
But part of her could not forget the shock Elise and Amorette looked at her with. It was not hate, not the way Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia routinely looked at her, but there was still an element of fear. She just did not know why! Yes, she understood that wizards needed wands to do magic – although the werewolves seemed to do just fine with potions, so she did not understand why that was an exception – but all she was doing was moving something. It was literally the third magic spell she had taught herself to do.
That should not be a reason for them to be afraid. She had not done anything scary or special.
Hazel sniffed and rubbed her nose, doing her best not to think about what that meant for the future. Was this fear something she would have to deal with forever? Unless she found other druids, if she only ever dealt with wizards, would they always look at her as if her kind of magic was unnatural? She had set out from Privet Drive to learn about magic and find more people like her, but despite finding an entire society of magic-users it almost felt like she was more alone now than ever.
Machecoul was a small town, more a village than anything else, and it did not take long for her feet to carry her to a set of towers standing above a pile of crumbling ruins and brickwork. A few other people were wandering around them as well, taking photographs and being tourists just like she was. The more she watched, though, the more something very odd stood out. People were taking pictures of one of the towers and the surrounding walls, but everybody was ignoring the other tower. Not a single person even looked at it.
The other tower which had multiple chains wrapped around it.
She stepped into the ruins proper and walked over to the ignored tower. From the corner of her eye she could see a few people look at her, but as soon as she crossed some invisible threshold they immediately looked away.
They aren't ignoring me or it, she realized.
They legitimately can't see us.
Now that she was closer, she could get a better look at the chains. That took away any possibility that this was not magical. The chains were made from a dark metal with veins of gold running through each link. Nails, thick as one of her fingers but rusted, were punched through the stone walls at regular intervals to hold the chains to the tower. Hanging from the links set between the nails were small golden rectangles, and when she crouched down to examine one she could see that strange shapes and symbols had been carved into the plate all the way through to the other side.
Well, well, well. de Rais must have succeeded at something, or there would be no reason for the wizards to hide it like this. She stood up straight.
The only question is what.
She reached up to touch the stone walls only for Morgan to squawk and take off from her shoulder. He flew away from the tower and landed on the lip of a window set into the chunk of wall perhaps thirty feet away from her.
What has gotten into you, she demanded with one hand propped on her hip.
It's just a building. You've been in plenty of them before.
Morgan sang to her, his song full of terror, and she sighed.
Fine. Stay out here. Don't run off. I'll be back in a couple of minutes.
There was only door in or out of the tower, and Hazel squeezed herself through the lengths of chain that crossed the entrance way. To her left, a set of stairs curled upwards to the second story she had been able to see from the outside, but while the castle had once been taller that was as high as it went now. To her right, more stairs but going downwards into the earth.
There was only one real option. To the right she turned, following the stairs as they descended into a basement. Reaching into her satchel, she pulled out her torch and clicked it on before her steps resumed. The room she stood in now was tall – or deep, rather – with sconces on the walls for torches or candles to be fitted into. A desk stood on the floor pushed up against the wall, old wax frozen forever as it dripped off the edges. From higher up on the stairs she had been able to see smudges on the floor, but once she reached the landing they were harder to make out from the dark stone. This was not even the lowest level, for a few feet away the stairs began again and descended ever farther.
She stepped lightly as she crossed the floor, staying well away rom the places where she remembered seeing the smudged stains. She did not see any evidence of a demon or a monster lurking around, and stepping on the smudges probably would not draw one out. Still better safe than sorry.
The desk, now that she was next to it, looked in far worse shape than it had when she stood on the stairs. It also was less a desk and more just a table with a thick top. There were no drawers or anything to store pens or ink or books, and she could only assume de Rais and his assistants had brought books and things down to the basement and took them back upstairs when they were done. Even down here, however, the desk could not withstand the ravages of centuries. There were several places that the wood had started to rot, and as her light played over the front she could see how what was not rotting had nonetheless twisted and warped. She was scared to touch it or even to breathe too hard on it. It looked like it could fall apart at any moment.
Retracing her steps, she made her way back to the stairs and peered down. So far she had found nothing of note, certainly nothing worth chaining the building itself up. There had to be some reason for it, though, and it was nothing up here.
The stones of the stairs leading to the second basement felt less even than those above, as if the pressure of the dirt pushing against the walls was making the steps buckle. The deeper she went, the more obvious it became until the last few steps leading to the lowest floor had a difference of easily half an inch or more. The floor itself was hard beneath her feet, but the stone that made it up was buried under a thick layer of dirt and grime. The light of her torch swept across the room and froze in place when it landed on two boys standing in the middle of the room.
They were relatively short, only half a head taller than her if she had to guess, and both wore brightly colored trousers – one blue, one yellow – beneath white long-sleeved shirts that reached halfway to their knees. One was blond, the other brunette, both were barefoot, and they were facing away from her staring at the opposite wall. Even with the light at their backs and clearly shining past them, they did not turn to face her.
Swallowing thickly, Hazel was not sure whether to thank or curse her inability to speak. They were not reacting to the light, but would they react to spoken words? Most likely. Almost certainly. Whether that would be for good or ill, though, that was the question.
She took a small step forwards. Then another. And a third. Despite her approach, the two boys still did not move.
Something crunched beneath her shoes, and she aimed the light down to see what it was. Her eyes landed on bones, lots and lots of tiny bones that looked like they must have come from mice or some other critter of similar size. Her heart started beating faster as she realized where she was
not shining the light, and her torch darted back up.
The boys were still, and she let out a quiet sigh only for them to choose that moment to start turning around. Their movements were an eerie synchrony, spinning at the same speed but in opposite directions so their backs were to each other before they faced her fully. The strange shirts they wore were covered with reddish brown stains, long-dried blood that had poured out of numerous holes stabbed into their chests. One, now that she was seeing them fully, was even missing a hand, the stump of his arm roughly hacked away with shards of bone and strings of muscle dangling from the torn flesh.
They cocked their heads in unison, their blank doll's eyes staring at her. "Warm?" they asked in lilting voices.
That question sent a bolt of fear shivering down her spine. She waved the hand not holding the torch in a warding gesture.
Nope. Not warm. Not warm at all. Cold as ice, I am.
Twin grins appeared on their faces. Not happy grins, nor sad ones. Grins that made her just that much more frightened. "Warm," they repeated. Their hands rose, fingers curling and uncurling as though they were trying to grab something just in front of them, and they started walking towards her.
Oh no. That isn't happening. Picturing the outside of the tower, Hazel jumped—
—and her feet landed right back on the grimy floor in the tower. The hand holding the torch started trembling, but she took a quick breath and steeled her will. This was going to work. It had to! She jumped again, but once again she did not go anywhere.
"Warm," the boys said. Behind them, to the sides, even from below, bodies slipped through the walls as if solid stone was nothing but mist and shadow to them. Where once there were just two, now there were two dozen or more, all of them with hands outstretched and eyes locked on her. A few were girls, scattered here and there, but the vast majority of them were boys.
"Warm," the new figures said.
Hazel stumbled backwards, her feet crunching more bones beneath her weight. If she could not teleport away, that only left one other option.
As if sensing her intentions, the grins on the dead children turned into scowls. "Warm. Warm.
Warm." Their eyes sank into their heads, leaving empty sockets behind, and their bottom jaws dropped to midway down their chests to display mouths full of half-foot-long needle-like teeth. The wailing scream that came from them turned her blood to ice. "
WaaAaRRrMm!"
She turned tail and ran.
Up ten stairs she fled before she stumbled to a stop. Ahead of her, more of these horrific ghosts slid out of the walls and climbed out from beneath the stairs, their mouths already distorted and their missing eyes nonetheless locked on her. Looking behind, the rest of the ghosts were pushing their way up the staircase. She pressed her back to the wall as they continued their pursuit, left with nowhere else to go.
"
WaRm. WarM. WARM."
Hands grabbed her wrists and her arms and her shoulders and her legs and her ankles and around her neck. She opened her mouth in a silent scream. This was not right!
No! I don't want to die here! Leave me alone! Go away!
The dozen hands holding her suddenly let her free, and her eyes shot open even though she could not remember squeezing them shut. Her head whipped back and forth. All around her, the walking dead had turned around and were descending the stairs or slipping back into the walls. They were
leaving.
Why?
Stupid question, Hazel, she all but yelled at herself. She did not have time to ask why they had changed their minds about eating her. All she had time for was to get out of this place. As soon as the stairs above her were clear, she started running towards the sanctuary offered at the top of the staircase.
The sound of her footsteps was enough to break whatever spell she had somehow laid over the ghosts, and behind and below her the wailing resumed.
Something caught her left foot, and she fell forwards and landed heavily on the hard stone steps. The impact knocked the breath out of her. Gasping, she looked with fearful eyes at her foot and the hand and head that had slipped out of the wall to grab it. The ghost opened its mouth wider than before, a lightless void all she could see deep within its throat. Her other foot kicked out and hit it in the nose, and it shrieked more in shock than in pain. It was still enough for it to let go of her, and this time she did not waste time wondering. She scrambled up the remaining stairs on all fours like an animal until she reached the landing to the first basement. Despite the temptation to look behind to see if they were still following her, she kept her eyes forward and her feet pounding the stone as she kept running up and up and up.
The daylight streaming in through the open doorway was the most beautiful thing Hazel had ever seen, and she dived onto the stone floor and rolled underneath the lowest chain until she lay fully on the grass and dirt outside. From her position on her back, she could turn her head and peer back into the tower. Four twisted human heads were raised above the surface of the floor, and they stared at her in rage and hate and
hunger before sinking back down out of sight.
Her head fell fully onto the ground, her breath the quick panting of relief. Fluttering wings next to her caught her attention. Her hand reached up to stroke Morgan's breast feathers.
Clearly you're the brains of this operation. I should not have gone down there.
Morgan shot her a glare and pecked her finger harder than he normally did.
Yes, yes, I learned my lesson. Stay away from places associated with human sacrifice and demon summoning. She pushed herself to her feet and looked around.
What I'm more worried about right now is that something's wrong with my jumping and I don't know what. I couldn't get out of there. Morgan cocked his head at her, and she pointedly looked at the grass five feet away from her. A jump upwards to give him a demonstration—
—and she landed on the other side of the doorway, exactly where she had been looking.
…Huh.
She looked down at her feet, lifting her shoes to check the bottoms of them. Had she just been stuck in the ground at the lowest basement? That did not make any sense. She had jumped into and out of soft ground multiple times before now. Two more jumps, both short distances before returning to where she first stood, confirmed that her teleportation was intact again.
Her eyes fell upon the chains and the metal plates hanging from them, and she frowned. Maybe it was not a problem with her jumping. Maybe the problem had nothing to do with her in the first place. Maybe it had everything to do with whatever spells were worked into the bindings.
Those chains aren't just to keep normal people from noticing the tower, she told Morgan.
They look like they also keep those ghosts inside. It isn't impossible that they intentionally wanted to keep anyone – or anything – from teleporting out, especially if they were worried the spirits might be able to do just that. Whatever they meant to do, it seems to be working just fine.
She scooped her friend up and put him back on her shoulder.
Do you think there are other places like this in the world?
He twittered at her, and she nodded. He had a point. Even if there were, after this? She really should not go looking for them.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Happy Halloween, everybody. 
